Which content type…brand or sales?
I recently did an analysis of social media content from various businesses throughout the region and noticed a disturbing trend. Very few have a decent balance of both brand activation and sales activation. A company should have a mixture of both and they should be purposeful.
Brand Marketing
In addition to using these platforms for marketing to position your company as an expert, social media is… well, social. This makes it a great place to communicate your brand personality with folks who align with it. By continuously and carefully sharing content that says who you are, what you stand for, and what is important, you give customers and prospects the motivation to engage with you. Think about it. A salesperson does not attract prospects and build trust by pushing the ‘Do you want to buy?’ dialog. By and large it’s the personality that wins. When you show a genuine interest in the things that interest those with whom you communicate, and when those interests are shared- Boom! Trust and alignment develop. People buy from people and organisations they trust.
Sales Marketing
While you do need to build a relationship with your prospects and customers around common interests and values, we must never forget that as a business, one reason to seek the alignment and trust above is to convert those qualified prospects to customers. You’ve got to sell or there is no point to your business. Therefore, a decent proportion of your social media activities must be to elicit engagement that indicate the user’s position in their buying journey. Ideally, this generic journey of Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action must also be matched with relevant content. While LIKES, SHARES, and RETWEETS may provide some hint as to that position, these are likely to be meaningless on their own. The real worth is in comments, private messages, and click-throughs to your website. A combination of all these actions by a user is even more valuable.
Without a doubt the right proportion of branding vs. selling activities one should use on social media depends on the type of business, industry, and customer sales cycle. Also, note that I used the term ‘generic’ above when discussing the buying journey. It is extremely important for a company to define their own customer journey and sales process as this will guide content curation and the development of metrics, but I’ll leave that for another topic.
